Marketing is the New Finance

Not my words, but those of Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist. I think what he is saying is Marketing is about to undergo a performance (ROMI) revolution. Here’s the context for the quote, from the WSJ:

“I think marketing is the new finance. In the 1960s and 1970s [we] got interesting data, and a lot of analytic fire power focused on that data; Bob Merton and Fischer Black, the whole team of people that developed modern finance. So we saw huge gains in understanding performance in the finance industry. I think marketing is in the same place: now we’re getting a lot of really good data, we have tools, we have methods, we have smart people working on it. So my view is the quants are going to move from Wall Street to Madison Avenue.”

Varian recently took questions over on the Freakonomics blog that are an interesting read. On analytics, check this out:

“If you are looking for a career where your services will be in high demand, you should find something where you provide a scarce, complementary service to something that is getting ubiquitous and cheap. So what’s getting ubiquitous and cheap? Data. And what is complementary to data? Analysis.”